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Urban Wilds

I reflect back a decade to something I read from a Federal land survey that claimed every person in the contiguous United States – including the forest hermit and mountain lurker – is no more than 17.6 miles from a road.

Let’s consider that idea of magnitudinal urban sprawl for a moment.
The history of the development of America has been one of extreme Westward movement: We want to get away from each other; we want land of our own; we need private space.
Suburbia is a perfect example of this sort of “lazying out” from the city core – but what happens when suburban areas become tighter and paved and they transmogrify into “Megalopolises” as geographer Jean Gottmann suggested in 1961 or the ever-infringing “Edge City” as Joel Garreau described in his 1991 monograph of the same name.

As the ability to sprawl subsides and we all have the ability to touch a road in all directions without moving a step, we will begin moving on top of each other.
Soon the only way to build new infrastructure will be skyward atop existing superstructures as the paths and the woodlands and the empty spaces become memories and parking lots and superhighways and the final means of transit for storing people.

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Lincoln After Seven Years

We live in disposable times. Our lives are wispy and temporary. I suppose this has always been true, but in the present Age of Momentary Relationships and Passing Glances, I consider myself blessed that I was able to live the first 23 years of my life in the same house. Because of that rock-solid start in a community, I have an indelible sense of home and of belonging and of being a valued and of being a rooted member in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Movin’ On Up
After living in the same house Lincoln for 23 years, life changed. I moved to Washington, D.C. and I lived in two different apartments in no less than eight months. I then moved to New York City and I lived in one apartment for 60 days and then four other apartments over the last ten years. It’s a difficult task to move the essence of your life into cardboard boxes, deciding, after each move into new digs, what you want to keep and what you don’t mind throwing away and losing forever to the trash heap of former experiences.

This redaction of our lives into “save” and “don’t save” piles gives the body of who we are less volume with each move — our experience has been paged through and edited down to the basic nuts and bolts of mere survival.

Murky Bottom Memories
Memory and experience are the only threads back to our past, the physical touchstones have been pitched upon the lakes of our rippling lives and they’ve sunk to the murky bottom never to be retrieved or held again.

There’s a sliding scale of importance that is always prevalent when deciding what to take with you. Something you throw away now that you kept the last time you moved is a large mark defining who you are and where you came from: It is yet another ring in the tree of your life, for once this object had meaning and now it has none except as a breadcrumb of where you at a moment in time.

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